Profile of Thorin Caristo- From Occupy Wall Street Protester to Live Documentarian | on PBS Blog POV

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Excellent list of links and videos for watching Occupy Wall Street:

occupywallstnyc's Livestream page, including video by Thorin Caristo

globalrevolution's Livestream page

Right Here All Over by Alex Mallis and Lily Henderson (via Vimeo): The most-watched protest video to date on Vimeo.

End the War, Tax the Rich, We're the 99%, Occupy Wall Street by Jonathan Demme (via Vimeo): The director of Silence of the Lambs and the doc Stop Making Sense captures the sights and sounds around Zuccotti Park.

Deepak Chopra meditation at Occupy Wall St. Grounded... by occupywallstnyc and Ground.TV (via Livestream): Documents the celebrity spiritualist as he shows protesters how to meditate.

Occupy Wall Street Sept 17: Protester speaks out (via YouTube): From the first day of the protest.

Occupy Everything by Kristopher Rae (via Vimeo): Documents the Oct. 1, 2011, Brooklyn Bridge march, where more than 700 protesters are arrested.

#OccupyWallSt - Law Student & Journalist Arrested for Civil Disobedience 9/24/11 (via YouTube)

Where Do We Go From Here? Occupy Wall St. (via Vimeo): Ed David talks to protesters on its one-month anniversary.

Open Rights Group reports of state of VOD in the UK | Can't look now: finding film online

Can't look now: finding film online

By Peter Bradwell on Oct 19, 2011. Comments (6)

(Written with Jag Bahra)

Excerpt from a long & detailed post on OpenRightsGroup:

"Last week YouTube announced the opening of its movie rental service. This could be great news for film lovers, offering easy access to the films they want to watch. Exactly how useful this is to consumers depends somewhat on how many films are available through the service.

The availability of legal content online has featured heavily in discussions about the digital economy, most recently in the ongoing roundtables, hosted by the Minister Ed Vaizey MP, about new website blocking powers over sites involved in copyright infringement. The question is whether consumers' demand for films, music and other goods is being satisfied.

ORG, and others such as Consumer Focus, believe that more attention needs to be paid to how well the markets for films and music are serving consumers before we assume that certain kinds of enforcement measures are necessary and proportionate. We want to see thriving and innovative cultural markets that help creators and consumers get the best out of new technology.

In this context, and against the backdrop of the recent injunction won by the film industry that requires BT to block the website Newzbin2, we decided to have a look at the availability of films online. We looked at how many of the recent best-sellers and catalogues of critically acclaimed films, including the top 50 British films, consumers can legally buy or rent online. We searched five content providers, and looked at rental and purchasing prices, and compared them with DVD availability and prices.

Our experience points to a lack of availability, poor pricing and quality issues when compared with physical media. In short, we found a situation that indicates serious problems with the licensing of films for online providers. (See bottom of the post for more on what we did and tables of what we found.)

Poor availability

Given the scope of our work and the way catalogues available in these services frequently change, these results should be seen as indicative only. They point at the questions policy makers should be asking about cultural markets online.  What they indicate is not good news for consmers. Anybody who has tried renting or buying films online will probably be unsurprised at what we found.

DVDs are available for just shy of 100% of the films. But a wealth of British cultural history is simply not available through legal providers. Only 43% of the top 50 British films can be bought or rented online. Similarly, only 58% of the BAFTA Best Film award winners since 1960 have been made available.

The situation looks worse if iTunes is discounted. Excluding iTunes, only 27% of the BAFTA award winners are available, with 29% of the best British films. Only 6% of the best 50 British films are on Film4 OD or Virgin Media, with 14% available through a LoveFilm subscription and 4% through pay per view on LoveFilm.

Availability is better for recent best selling releases, but it is still very patchy. Some 86% of the best selling films on Amazon.co.uk in August 2011 can be bought on iTunes, but only 63% on blinkbox. There are few other means to purchase digital versions of films online. Furthermore, purchasing films on blinkbox for the most part means purchasing unlimited access to a stream. Only some are available to download, and for PCs only, meaning access is, for many, dependent on blinkbox's continued existence.

Rental services fare worse – 64% of the films are available to rent on iTunes, 18% are available on Lovefilm pay-per-view, 55% on blinkbox and 41% on Film4 OD and Virgin Media.

Price and quality

Digital prices do not compare favourably to those of DVDs. For the best selling DVDs from August 2011 the average price was £6.80. For iTunes purchases, of the films available through it's service, the average price was £8.88. For blinkbox purchases the price stood at £9.49.

Of the 14 of the 49 best British films available to purchase on iTunes, the average price is £6.56, while for DVDs the average price is £6.63. DVD prices for the BAFTA winning films average at £5.84, whilst on iTunes the average price stands at £6.72. For the 7 of those films available on blinkbox, the average price is £5.70.

The quality of films available online also does not compare well with physical media. Standard definition tends to be just short of DVD quality across the content providers. HD film purchases and rental are available on iTunes only, with 45.5% of the best selling DVDs from August available to buy (at an average of £11.59) and 40.9% to rent (at an average of £4.49)..."

Read the full post here:

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2011/cant-look-now:-finding-film-online

Removal of restrictions can DECREASE music piracy - Study at Rice University | Excerpt #infdist

10/7/2011

David Ruth
713-348-6327
druth@rice.edu

Amy Hodges
713-348-6777
amy.hodges@rice.edu

Removal of restrictions can decrease music piracy
New research from Rice and Duke challenges conventional wisdom that removal of restrictions would increase piracy levels

Contrary to the traditional views of the music industry, removal of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions can actually decrease piracy, according to new research from Rice University and Duke University.

Marketing professors Dinah Vernik of Rice and Devavrat Purohit and Preyas Desai of Duke used analytical modeling to examine how piracy is influenced by the presence or absence of DRM restrictions. They found that while these restrictions make piracy more costly and difficult, the restrictions also have a negative impact on legal users who have no intention of doing anything illegal. 

Their findings, which will appear in the November-December issue of Marketing Science, add to the ongoing debate about technology that limits usage of digital content.

Because a DRM-restricted product will only be purchased by a legal user, …"only the legal users pay the price and suffer from the restrictions," the study said. "Illegal users are not affected because the pirated product does not have DRM restrictions."

"In many cases, DRM restrictions prevent legal users from doing something as normal as making backup copies of their music," said Vernik, assistant professor of marketing at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business. "Because of these inconveniences, some consumers choose to pirate."

The research challenges conventional wisdom that removal of DRM restrictions increases piracy levels; the study shows that piracy can actually decrease when a company allows restriction-free downloads.

"Removal of these restrictions makes the product more convenient to use and intensifies competition with the traditional format (CDs), which has no DRM restrictions," Vernik said. "This increased competition results in decreased prices for both downloadable and CD music and makes it more likely that consumers will move from stealing music to buying legal downloads."

Very Cool Remix Project - 5 DJs + an Orchestra = RE:GENERATION - Future of Branded Content

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From the Facebook Page:

"Five DJs turn the tables on the history of music. Follow DJ Premier, Mark Ronson, Skrillex, Pretty Lights and The Crystal Method as they remix, recreate and re-imagine five traditional styles of music. From the classical perfection of the Berklee Symphony Orchestra to the bayou jams of New Orleans jazz, our five distinctive DJs collaborate with some of today’s biggest musicians to discover how our musical past is influencing the future..."

Cory Doctorow & more distressing facts: Movie fans turn to piracy when the online cupboard is bare | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Excerpt from Cory Doctoro's original post in the GuardianUK 22 November 2011.

"....Here's what ORG found: though close to 100% of their sample were available as DVDs, more than half of the top 50 UK films of all time were not available as downloads. The numbers are only slightly better for Bafta winners: just 58% of Bafta best film winners since 1960 can be bought or rented as digital downloads (the bulk of these are through iTunes – take away the iTunes marketplace, which isn't available unless you use Mac or Windows, and only 27% of the Bafta winners can be had legally).

And while recent blockbusters fare better, it's still a patchwork, requiring the public to open accounts with several services to access the whole catalogue (which still has many important omissions).

But even in those marketplaces, movies are a bad deal – movie prices are about 30% to 50% higher when downloaded over the internet versus buying the same movies on DVDs. Some entertainment industry insiders argue that DVDs, boxes and so forth add negligible expense to their bottom line, but it's hard to see how movie could cost less on physical DVDs than as ethereal bits, unless the explanation is price-gouging. To add insult to injury, the high-priced online versions are often sold at lower resolutions than the same movies on cheap DVDs...."

the long downhill slide of the film/VOD industry - what other industry functions like this?

full post here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/22/movie-fans-piracy-online

Huge: Telefilm Canada launches new Success Index at Annual Public Meeting in Winnipeg

Telefilm Canada launches new Success Index at Annual Public Meeting in Winnipeg


Fiscal 2010-2011 results also unveiled  

Winnipeg, November 23, 2011 – Telefilm Canada held its third Annual Public Meeting in Winnipeg this afternoon. The event was also broadcast live via a Webcast. Michel Roy, Chair of the Board, and Carolle Brabant, Executive Director, announced details of the organization’s innovative Success Index, which will effectively measure the cultural, industrial and commercial performance of its portfolio, as well as presented highlights of Telefilm’s 2010-2011 annual report, entitled Daring to change: A new vision.

Telefilm Canada’s Success Index

In its most recent corporate plan, entitled Fostering cultural success, Telefilm stated that the creation of a broader measure of success was a top priority. Created in consultation with the Canadian audiovisual industry, the new Success Index is a quantitative tool that will allow Telefilm to measure the overall success of its investment portfolio over time. It is composed of a series of weighted attributes that are summarized under these three categories: 

- Commercial (60% of the total index)

    - Box-office receipts in Canada

    - Gross domestic and international sales

    - Cultural (30%)

      - Number of selections and prizes at certain international festivals and events

      - Selected awards won at certain national competitive events and festivals

      - Industrial (10%)

        - Ratio of private versus public funding in productions supported by Telefilm

        “Telefilm and Canada’s audiovisual industry believe that theatrical box-office earnings, while still very important, tell only a part of the story, given the industry’s increasing brand appeal on the international scene and the expansion of online distribution platforms,” said Michel Roy. “Telefilm is innovating by creating a more comprehensive success index that takes into account commercial factors, cultural factors and industrial factors.”

        Carolle Brabant added: “The new Success Index will paint a more accurate picture of the performance of feature films funded by Telefilm. In so doing, this success index will make it possible to better demonstrate the significant contribution of Canadian cinema on the cultural and economic fronts. As well, given the abundant information it will provide each year, the Success Index will enable Telefilm to provide more strategic, better-targeted support to the industry in the years ahead.” 

        Telefilm Canada’s first online-only annual report

        As part of its ongoing efforts to be more environmentally responsible and to be innovative in the digital multiplatform reality, Telefilm launched its first online-only annual report.

        The following are highlights from fiscal 2010-2011:

        - The brand image of Canadian cinema is increasingly strong. Last year, two films—Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies and Richard J. Lewis’ Barney’s Version—together took home 52 awards and grossed $35 million at the box office globally. In all, Canadian films supported by Telefilm won 127 awards worldwide, compared to 107 the previous year.

        - Total domestic market share for Canadian films was 3.1% in 2010. Within the independent film market (non-Hollywood majors), Canadian films can and do compete with a more robust 20% share.

        - Financing national feature films is always an important challenge, in every country. But in an encouraging sign, Canadian private-sector investments and foreign participation doubled last year, accounting for 26% of total production budgets. The number of Canada’s coproductions with other countries also rose to 57 projects, representing a capital injection of more than 200 million foreign dollars.

        - In 2010- 2011, Telefilm supported the production of 48 feature films, compared to 43 the year before—due to an increase in private-sector and foreign participation. Telefilm provided 31% of overall production costs, down from 38% the year before. In other words, by having to invest less per film Telefilm was able to fund more projects.

        - Telefilm announced that it was working on a national and international promotional strategy, in partnership with the Canada Media Fund, aimed at creating a groundswell in favour of Canadian content.

        - Telefilm renewed its service agreement for another year with the Canada Media Fund, marking five years of collaboration between the two organizations.

        - Telefilm kept the fees for administering its programs at 6.2%, in line with its promise of sound governance for the public funds that are entrusted to it. This performance generated an administrative surplus of $1.5 million, which was re-invested into the Canada Feature Film Fund.

        The 2010-2011 annual report and Annual Public Meeting Webcast are available at www.telefilm.ca/apm-2011/.

        About Telefilm Canada

        Telefilm Canada is a federal cultural agency dedicated to developing and promoting the Canadian audiovisual industry. Telefilm provides financial support to the private sector to create distinctively Canadian productions that appeal to domestic and international audiences. Telefilm also administers the Canada Media Fund’s programs. Visit www.telefilm.ca.

        -30-

        Media inquiries:
        Douglas Chow, Manager, External Communications
        Telefilm Canada
        (514) 283-0838, ext. 2225, or 1-800-567-0890
        douglas.chow@telefilm.ca
        http://twitter.com/Telefilm_Canada

        info@telefilm.ca

Full report reposted from telefilm.gc.ca site -